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“Happy families are all alike,” Tolstoy famously wrote, “but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Few have ever questioned the validity of Tolstoy’ assertion — but the opposite might well be said of those most volatile family members: teenagers. Every happy teen, after all, is happy in his or her own way; but unhappy teens are all alike.

Such a declaration, of course, hardly diminishes the issues forever bedeviling teenagers: navigating a maelstrom of suddenly unleashed hormones; confronting the riddle of how (or whether) to try to fit in with one’s peers; exploring the limits of rebellion against … everything. Even one of the saving graces of teen misery — namely, the eventual realization that almost everyone, to some degree, suffers the same cruelties during those confounding years — even that saving grace is merely acknowledgement that, at heart, adolescence can be a waking nightmare.